Serious About Mental Health Of Challenged Children

Hamden's Church Street School Bringing Together Mental Health Care Providers, Teachers and Parents

November 28, 2010|Susan Campbell

At Hamden's Church Street School last year, one child showed up with an eating disorder whose symptoms include an appetite for things like dirt and paper. Another child recently had been homeless. A third could do little more than lay her head on her desk unless a teacher stepped in.

Church Street serves some of the poorest of Hamden's children. The school has a relatively high rate of both special-education referrals and students who receive counseling for emotional or behavioral issues. Yet there's just one school psychologist, a social worker and a school nurse to serve roughly 400 students.

So imagine you're the teacher. Go ahead. Teach something to those children, and to the other 20 children in the room.

Other schools face similar challenges, but Church Street School is doing something about it with an unusual partnership between parents and area mental health-care providers. Based on a series of surveys and focus groups among staff, parents and others, the program, Educational Care Collaborative, aims for a coordinated care-delivery system that will include school-based mental health clinics, an emphasis on emotional well-being and more hands on deck when it comes to identifying and treating students who need it.

"Almost every child in Connecticut has the potential to be exposed to events and situations that can impair mental health: bullying and cyberbullying, academic problems, sexual and physical trauma, drug and alcohol abuse, family stressors and financial hardship, among others," said Eric Arzubi, a Yale resident physician in psychiatry who heads the children's committee of Connecticut's Keep the Promise Coalition.

Arzubi is the force behind the collaborative, which focuses on parent support and training and on providing support for mental health-care providers in the form of graduate students with training in psychology.

Arzubi has a background on Wall Street, but left that career, he said, because he wanted to make a difference.

"I kept thinking of my pediatrician in Vermont," Arzubi said. "He was a real, solid presence. Even when he retired, he continued to volunteer his time and help people."

Arzubi left Wall Street to start a professional tutoring service with his wife. From there, it wasn't a big leap to want to get to the core of why some students don't learn at school, especially in their early years, when children may be more malleable to treatment and guidance.

"A child's first stage outside the home is the school," Arzubi said. "Wouldn't it make sense to help them succeed? Schools are the biggest providers of mental-health services to kids in the country. That's staggering. Wouldn't it make sense that we empower school districts and build bridges to work with kids?"

The program is very much a product of the community it serves. One focus group said parents don't always know how to distinguish between normal behavior and potential mental-health problems. About half of the school's staff said family conflict and tardiness keep students from learning. So there will be parent training classes.

Once an issue is identified, parents said they often don't know how to find a good mental health-care provider, and school staff said students wait too long to be seen by a professional once a referral is made. Most felt there aren't enough services to go around, thus the need for on-site mental-health services.

"We're making a lot of strides with improving our teaching strategies and improving the quality of instruction, but there are still students who continue to struggle," said Chris Brown, Hamden's coordinator of special education support services. "We are looking to bring community providers to the school, after school hours. That way, it stays in the neighborhood, in a familiar location. We're excited about this."